Sunday, May 19, 2013

Ender's Game movie comes out in November.

'Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci are two of the writer-producers behind "Star Trek Into Darkness," but the team known as "K/O" is also producing the coming films "Ender's Game," "Now You See Me" and the Fox television series "Sleepy Hollow." Not to mention the sequel to "The Amazing Spider-Man," which they co-wrote and which is currently filming around New York.

Speakeasy talked with Kurtzman and Orci, who have been friends and writing partners for more than 20 years, starting with the television series "Hercules: The Legendary Journeys."

"It's funny, it used to be a binary, like he's Spock and I'm Kirk, in terms of personality," Kurtzman says. "It's not quite that simple anymore. I think when we first started, Bob was more about logic and logic flow, and I was always about the emotion of what was going on. Now, having written together for almost 22 years, our voices are in each other's heads to such a large degree that it's very difficult sometimes to distinguish between the two."

What were some of the challenges you and director Gavin Hood faced in adapting Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game" into a film?

Orci: "Ender's Game" was a book that we both loved from teenagehood. It was published in 1985 and I think we read it in high school, maybe even earlier. The challenge with the book is it's very internal in that a lot of the narrative that occurs is within the character's head and the trick is, how do you dramatize that? The answer is both through having some of those internal struggles be dramatically shown as scenes, and second, we have an advantage that the book does not have, and that is actors. We have great actors who can not only say things, but play things and play reactions on their faces and actually convey a lot of the emotion of the book. Thankfully now we have the technology to make it the grand adventure that it deserves to be. We have the technology to render a Zero-G environment in a totally believable and incredible way.'